Monotonous Forest

Best thing I've heard this week

My introduction to the music of John Luther Adams was just last November, when David Shively of Either/Or performed "Roar," "Crash," and "Wail," three explorations of pure sound from The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies (2002).  (The other five are "Burst," "Rumble," "Shimmer," "Thunder" and "Stutter," and the entire piece is available with percussionist Steven Schick on Cantaloupe.)

So if you haven't seen Alex Ross's evocative portrait of Adams in The New Yorker, make sure you check it out and above all, listen to Dark Waves (2007), an utterly fascinating work for orchestra and electronics.  (The link is at the end of the article.)  It bears some resemblance to Ligeti's Atmosphères, but Adams uses the ensemble in an entirely original way.  At about 13 minutes long, it's easy to hear more than once; I have already listened to it three or four times.  And if there is any justice, it will appear on a concert program in New York soon.

Tag, I'm it

For those unfamiliar with the word "meme" (blogspeak version), it refers to an idea posted by one blog, which then asks others to respond, sort of like a chain letter but potentially more entertaining.  (I also like this definition, from Aware new media design of New Zealand: a "viral encapsulated idea, with built-in feedback loop.")  I was tagged by Tonic Blotter and shortly thereafter by Steve Smith, with the following assignment:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

The result:

"We've spent a happy weekend together, all three of us.  We haven't talked about my scheme.  Or scarcely."

This regrettably brief excerpt from Michael Frayn's novel Headlong (1999) hardly shows this author's comic timing and intellect; he's the author of two of my favorite plays, Noises Off (1982) and Copenhagen (1998).  This story concerns a philosopher and his art-historian wife, who believe they have found a Bruegel painting in their chimney.  I'd offer more comments, but I haven't finished it yet, since it surfaced just last weekend in Philadelphia at one of my favorite haunts, The Book Trader. 

All right, I choose: Robert Kirkpatrick, George Hunka, Miguel Frasconi, Clayton G. Koonce and Emily XYZ.

[Vintage label from The Virtual Absinthe Museum]

Chicago snags Muti

From the 1980s, when I heard Riccardo Muti in some impressively programmed and played concerts with the Philadelphia Orchestra, I have often been floored by his musicianship.  An alltime favorite combined three choral works: Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus, Bruckner's Te Deum and Verdi's Four Sacred Pieces.  Although the Mozart shows up now and then, the last two are relative rarities in the concert hall.  Muti's Scriabin recordings with that ensemble are some of the most luxuriously phrased, and I love his operatic Mahler First Symphony, which is to my knowledge the only one of the composer's that he recorded.

So now he is in Chicago, and I can't help but feel slightly envious, especially since when Muti conducts the New York Philharmonic, the results are often explosive.  Just last January he all but cracked open Avery Fisher Hall with Scriabin's Le Poème de l’extase.  Yes, he could probably be even more adventurous in programming living composers in general (and some of his countrymen like Scelsi and Sciarrino in particular), but perhaps his Chicago tenure will encourage that.  On paper, it seems like a great orchestra, already shepherded by Pierre Boulez and Bernard Haitink, is making long-range plans for even more years of excitement.

[Photo: Riccardo Muti by Guido Harari]

Washed ashore

Earlier this year, three enormous grand pianos appeared on the beach of Schiermonnikoog, a small island at the northern tip of the Netherlands.  The striking wooden instruments, artist(s) uncredited to date, are thought to be part of the (in my opinion, brilliant) marketing campaign for the 2008 Schiermonnikoog International Festival of Chamber Music in October.

Via Molly Sheridan, FunForever, and (backtracking), Marketing Safari, the latter two with more photos.

Update: the artist is Florentijn Hofman, and the title is Paal 5 (Signpost 5).  (Thanks to Alex Kotch's Sound and Space.)

Paint and sound in motion

Music marries well with works of Joseph La Piana, whose show Kinetic State at Robert Miller Gallery is the intriguing backdrop of the first two nights of this year's Look & Listen Festival.  To begin and end the evening, So Percussion corralled groups of bells, gongs, pieces of metal and a toy piano for Jason Treuting's Amid the Noise, an electic assemblage of short works exploring noise "conceived as soundtracks for everyday moments in everyday life."  In the second half Zeena Parkins added some gorgeous growls from an amplified harp.

Cello and percussion duo Odd Appetite also did two works, starting with Nathan Davis's Yebyar Untai (2005) for amplified cello and hammered dulcimer, each in shimmering microtones.  Cellist/composer Ha-Yang Kim offered Oon (2004) influenced by Balinese music, for cello (with wah-wah pedal) and percussion.  And in between, the Biava String Quartet did a fiery reading of Kodály's 90-year-old String Quartet No. 2, followed by singer/violinist Carla Kihlstedt and 2 Foot Yard in five works showing among other things, the group's facility with complex rhythmic changes.

The festival continues tonight and tomorrow, with performances by counter)induction, Split Second, the Contemporary Ensemble at Purchase, Mark Stewart, Daedalus String Quartet, Electric Kompany and Ethel.  And with a ticket price of $10, I don't want to hear anyone complaining that groovy listening in New York is too expensive.

[Photo: "Isabel" (2007, enamel, ink and shellac on canvas) by Joseph La Piana, at Robert Miller Gallery]

A blind pianist and a percussion guru

Ragtime Riches and A Copasetic Jazz Gathering.  The Juilliard Journal, May 2008.

Carter's new Clarinet Quintet

Completed in September of 2007, Elliott Carter's Clarinet Quintet is scarcely 15 minutes long, yet shows the 99-year-old composer to be still bubbling with invention.  And last night clarinetist Charles Neidich and the Juilliard String Quartet gave us a gift: a second reading of it at the end of the concert.

In three movements, the piece often pits the clarinet against the strings, almost as a saboteur, with the composer's typical mercurial mood shifts.  About midway, the strings hold stratospheric notes pianissimo, while the clarinet is at the other end of the spectrum, at the low end of its range.  And as the composer later explained, the intervals he chose for the clarinet differ from the ones he uses for the others, subtly increasing the divide between the two forces.

Perhaps my favorite part is the final movement, about which Neidich writes, "The clarinet plays what may be the longest sustained melody ever written for the instrument while the strings play ever more involved figurations as if trying to be willfully oblivious of what the clarinet is playing."  It reminded me of a sort of chamber music complement to the first movement of Nielsen's Fifth Symphony, in which a snare drum is given the task of trying to "halt the progress of the orchestra."

The superbly expressive Juilliard musicians filled out the evening with five of Carter's solo works: Riconoscenza per Goffredo Petrassi (for violin, from 1984), Figment (cello, 1994), Gra (clarinet, 1993), Rhapsodic Musings (violin, 2001) and Figment IV (viola, 2007).  At intermission, Ara Guzelimian asked Carter right off the bat, "So what about this combination of instruments appealed to you?"  Without losing a beat, the composer replied, "I really don't know!"

Update: Steve Smith captures the mood in his write-up for The New York Times, and a big "yes" to that first sentence.

[Clarinet drawing from MadProf's Workshop]

JazzFest webcasts: cheaper than airfare

On May 3 and 4 starting at 2:00 p.m., you can dip into some of JazzFest thanks to free live webcasts, which will also feature taped highlights from last weekend's line-up.

[Photo: "Bourbon Street, New Orleans" via And all that Malarkey on Flickr]

Undesirable music

How on earth did I miss this?  In 1997, taking a cue from Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid's project to determine America's most and least wanted paintings, Dave Soldier and Nina Mankin surveyed 500 people to determine what musical elements they liked and disliked the most.  From the results came two works, "The Most Wanted Song," and "The Most Unwanted Song," now available for listening on the increasingly indispensible UbuWeb.  Both are interesting, but the latter is almost pricelessly funny, and yet to my ears, oddly compelling.

It was determined that the most unwanted ensemble was a large orchestra, with the most undesirable instruments being the accordion and bagpipes.  Cowboys and holidays are the most unwanted subjects for song lyrics.  "The Most Unwanted Song" is approximately 25 minutes, and if you can stand it, well worth hearing until the very end.  Make sure you are not in an environment where laughter is frowned upon.

[Thanks to a friend at Cambridge University, via Dial "M" for Musicology]

New Orleans Snapshot #3: Vipers and sunspots

On the last afternoon of the French Quarter Festival, I ambled over to hear the New Orleans Jazz Vipers, who set up shop right in the middle of Royal Street.  A septet with no percussion, the Vipers get their retro swing from fast-strumming double bass and guitar, while violin, clarinet, trumpet, alto and bass saxophones dart about like a flock of swallows.  Each member sings, each with a different character to match a particular song.  A guest vocalist, Miss Sophie Lee, was a perfect flashback to 1935 singing Hoagy Carmichael's "Bread and Gravy."

Their bubbling results pulled in a huge crowd, with about five or six couples pulling off some elaborate dance moves.  A young barbecue chef (he volunteered the information) standing next to me complained, "These guys need a much bigger stage."

After an afternoon nap, I returned to the Mississippi River stages, first to see Kermit Ruffins and his Barbecue Allstars.  At this point Ruffins is one of the city's unofficial ambassadors, whose optimism comes out in every bar of his swanky trumpet work.  But I'm just a sucker for zydeco, and on a nearby stage were Sunpie and the Louisiana Sunspots.  Bruce "Sunpie" Barnes (above, accordion, harmonica and vocals) and his expert musicians combine blues, African and Caribbean influences that had dozens of people in manic footwork on the grass around the stage.  Sunset doesn't get any happier.

I ended up at the bar at Deanie's Seafood, for a Manhattan and a bowl of crawfish etoufee, and conversation with more out-of-towners.  Sitting next to me were a woman from Yellowknife, a town in Canada's Northwest Territories, and a guy from Frankfurt, Germany who was on his way to Bogotá, Columbia the next morning.

Listening in Sanskrit

At last night's Satyagraha at the Met, I found myself unexpectedly entranced, as did my listening partner for the evening.  The production design, by Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch, is filled with haunting imagery that enhances the hypnotic effect of Philip Glass and Constance DeJong's homage to Gandhi.  In Act II, an ascent of scores of lanterns is breathtaking, and the final scene, which juxtaposes Gandhi with Martin Luther King, is both serene and powerful.  That said (and a longer review to come), I don't expect to be craving hearing the score again anytime soon.  But others clearly disagree: at the conclusion, thousands in the audience were standing and cheering, especially for Richard Croft in the taxing lead role.  My own reaction aside, I found the response absolutely heartening, and it bodes well for the Met taking even bigger risks down the road.

[Photos from Acts I and II by Ken Howard / Courtesy of the Metropolitan Opera]

Offbeat venue vs. Stravinsky

Musical values aside for a moment (and there were many), Saturday's all-Stravinsky concert at the Park Avenue Armory was an event for a number of reasons, including a drive-by from the weekend's most publicized out-of-towner.  (Thanks to Alex Ross for a glimpse.) 

With the help of strong playing and singing from the Gotham City Orchestra and the Vox Vocal Ensemble, conductor George Steel can only be enthusiastically commended for programming some rarely heard works, including the short Variations (Aldous Huxley in memoriam) (1963-64) which was done twice.  And although the Symphony of Psalms (1930) appears fairly often, I don't recall ever hearing either the Mass (1944-48) or Requiem Canticles (1965-66) in live performance.  In the Armory's enormous, vaulted Drill Hall, the orchestra's brass sounded especially imposing, and many chords followed by silence had a haunting resonance.  (The room has a decay of almost six seconds.)

Steel should also be thanked for testing out the space, an entirely worthy experiment.  But I'm not totally convinced that the hall is ideal for many types of music, fascinating as the entire evening was.  Completed in 1879, it has an 80-foot ceiling, and is 200 feet wide, 300 feet long, so the stage and seating were placed at one end: visually it was like being adjacent to a basketball arena.  The sound often seemed to be dispersing itself all over the place.  (I did try sitting closer to the center of the stage, with some improvement.)  Voices were audible but sometimes had a metallic overtone.  Balances were dicey.  And the faster sections, such as the final movement of the Psalms, were a blur.

Perhaps Bruckner motets would fare better, or other slow-moving music less dependent on sudden rhythmic changes.  Recently a group tested the space with the first movement of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony, which unfortunately I couldn't attend, but I wonder how that fared.  In any case, this sold-out evening offered unusually well-chosen music, and much food for thought.

[Photo: 7th Regiment Armory Drill Hall by Jack E. Boucher, 1984]

Donizetti break

After seeing the final dress rehearsal for the Met's La Fille du Régiment, there is no way this is going to be anything other than a huge smash.  Yes, the biggest draws are probably Natalie Dessay and Juan Diego Flórez, who not only sing beautifully but command the stage with expert comic timing.  But some other cast members only increase the delight.  Felicity Palmer, in a 180-degree turn from playing nosy Mrs. Sedley in Peter Grimes, is uproarious as the haughty Marquise of Berkenfield.  And in a crucial non-singing role, Broadway veteran Marian Seldes tramps around as the Duchess of Krakenthorp using a voice that makes her character's surname sound positively onomatopoeic. 

Laurent Pelly's imaginative production, with with designer Chantal Thomas using folded maps to create mountains and valleys, is delicious and only increases opportunities for humor, but the biggest success here is the precision stage direction.  Dessay's early scene with an ironing board is a great example, but there is much more everywhere else.  I'm not sure whether to credit Pelly, choreographer Laura Scozzi or Associate Director Agathe Mélinande or all three, but I can't recall ever seeing something at the Met so consistently funny.  The icing on the cake: conductor Marco Armiliato and the orchestra, who deftly give the score the lightness and giddy sheen it needs.

[Photo from the Preservation Department, University of Buffalo Libraries]

New Orleans Snapshot #2: Morning inspiration, and the burning orange

At 11:00 last Saturday morning, an ensemble from the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz kicked off the day with a loving set on one of the riverfront stages, with boats of all types drifting by in the background.  Terence Blanchard is the artistic advisor of the Institute, now housed at Loyola University, and the almost-two-hour set by these talented students couldn't have been more uplifting.  Later that afternoon, my friends and I strolled over to the Old U.S. Mint, one of Louisiana's State Museums, hosting a blowout foursome: the Jimmy Thibodeaux Band, Jeremy & The Zydeco Hot Boyz, Terry & The Zydeco Bad Boys, and Dwayne Dopsie & The Zydeco Hellraisers.

But a dining experience won the prize that day (since a Toledo, Ohio friend reminded me that I hadn't mentioned a cocktail here in quite awhile).  At Arnaud's restaurant, one of their signature desserts is Café Brûlot, an intoxicating mix of coffee, Curaçao, brandy, orange and lemon rinds, cloves and cinnamon. The menu gives you no hint of the show that is to come. A waiter wheels a cart over to the table, then begins meticulously peeling an orange in a continuous, unbroken spiral, while separately heating the brandy and liqueur.  When all is ready, he ignites them, then raises the orange high (the center segments dangling from the peel) and slowly pours the mixture so it runs down the fruit, creating a dramatic flaming corkscrew hovering in the air, and eventually ending up in two glasses. 

[Photo: neon motorcycle spark plug wires by Boogey, from MAC Performance]

Blackbirds storm Manhattan

Tomorrow night I'll be at eighth blackbird's concert at Zankel Hall, with New York premieres of Double Sextet by Steve Reich, and singing in the dead of night, by David Lang, Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe.  For a preview, read Paul Bodine's write-up of the same program on Tuesday at the Samueli Theater in Costa Mesa.  (Thank you, Tim Mangan.)

New Orleans Snapshot #1: Bones

For those who crave trombones, the septet Bonerama has four of them, and their almost two-hour set at the end of the first day of the French Quarter Festival was riveting.  Sousaphonist Matt Perrine led his driving, infectious "Bayou Betty," from their latest CD Bringing It Home, taped live at Tipitina's, and just as danceable was "Cabbage Alley," a thumping anthem by The Meters.  And even Beethoven even made it to the party, with Steve Suter's "Equale," ingeniously morphed from Three Equali (for four trombones, of course). 

But the high point was a restless, inspired arrangement of Jimi Hendrix's "Crosstown Traffic."  Leader Mark Mullins has called Hendrix "one of his favorite trombonists," and the piece makes an effortless transition into brass territory.  Watching the group at sunset, with their celestial braying against the backdrop of the Mississippi River, we all agreed that this was pretty much jazz heaven.

[Photo: Bonerama in 2007 at the Maple Leaf, New Orleans]

Down to the Gulf

Tomorrow I'll be traveling to New Orleans once again, this time for the French Quarter Festival, with a stellar array of (mostly) local musicians.  Although the fun officially gets underway on Friday, I anticipate an early start on Thursday night at Vaughan's Lounge, blissfully taking in trumpet virtuoso Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers.

Blogging and/or reporting on the festival may be sporadic, since I hope to take a break from many day-to-day activities--including sitting at a computer.

[Photo: Vaughan's Lounge, via The Lookout Inn of New Orleans]

Worthy contenders

It's thrilling to see that David Lang has won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for The Little Match Girl Passion, first performed by the estimable Theatre of Voices last fall.  (I reviewed it here.)  Steve Smith gives Lang a nice nod as well, along with a link to Carnegie's site, where listeners can hear the piece for themselves.  And just today I heard that next year it will be performed by Donald Nally's Philadelphia-based choral group, The Crossing, whose female singers did a gorgeous reading of Lang's I Lie in October.

And as if that weren't enough good news, who would have predicted a year ago that a book on 20th-century music would be a Pulitzer finalist?  Happy days, indeed, and if you haven't read The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross, go get a copy.  Now.

[Illustration: The Little Match Girl (2004) by Mayken González Backlund, via The Hans Christian Andersen Center]